Overview

Written by a team of leading international scholars, The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and War illuminates the ways Shakespeare's works provide a rich and imaginative resource for thinking about the topic of war. Contributors explore the multiplicity of conflicting perspectives his dramas offer: war depicted from chivalric, masculine, nationalistic, and imperial perspectives; war depicted as a source of great excitement and as a theater of honor; war depicted from realistic or skeptical perspectives that expose the butchery, suffering, illness, famine, degradation, and havoc it causes. The essays in this volume examine the representations and rhetoric of war throughout Shakespeare's plays, as well as the modern history of the war plays on stage, in film, and in propaganda. This book offers fresh perspectives on Shakespeare's multifaceted representations of the complexities of early modern warfare, while at the same time illuminating why his perspectives on war and its consequences continue to matter now and in the future.

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9781316510971

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'The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and War is much more than an overview of a field or guide to an area and performs valuable intellectual work in bringing together diverse perspectives on a subject that embarrasses as well as attracts readers, many of whom want a straightforward understanding of a complicated subject that will inevitably resist mastery.' Andrew Hadfield, Times Literary Supplement

Author Information

David Loewenstein is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English and the Humanities at the Pennsylvania State University, University Park. His publications include Milton and the Drama of History: Historical Vision, Iconoclasm, and the Literary Imagination (1990); Representing Revolution in Milton and his Contemporaries: Religion, Politics, and Polemics in Radical Puritanism (2001, winner of the James Holly Hanford Award for Distinguished Book); The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature (2002; co-editor); The Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley (2009; co-editor); Treacherous Faith: The Specter of Heresy in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (2013); and Shakespeare and Early Modern Religion (2015; co-edited with Michael Witmore). He is an Honored Scholar of the Milton Society of America and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Paul Stevens is Professor and former Canada Research Chair in Early Modern Literature and Culture at the University of Toronto. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, his publications include Imagination and the Presence of Shakespeare in Paradise Lost (1985), Discontinuities: New Essays on Renaissance Literature and Criticism (1998; co-edited with Viviana Comensoli) and Early Modern Nationalism and Milton's England (2008; co-edited with David Loewenstein), which won the 2009 Irene Samuel Memorial Prize. He has twice won the James Holly Hanford Award for Most Distinguished Essay. A former Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, he has served as President of the Milton Society of America, and is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.

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